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The headlines this spring and summer have been full of references to federal and state budget discussions, usually revolving around cuts in funding. The Texas Legislature just finished its work, and the implications of their budget cuts will soon be rippling throughout city and county governments. In the culture and arts world, we always watch these events with interest, because they inevitably affect our operations. What starts out as a cut at the state level trickles down to city and county governments, affecting their ability to pay for basic services. When city and county leaders have to make choices on where to cut, museums, libraries and parks are always first in line.
For history museums, especially house museums, cuts in public funding are especially difficul ..

There are a lot of people that shudder when they hear the words “teenager” and “museum” in the same sentence. Two weeks ago, we held our annual Junior Historian training camp. During that week, I went to get my hair cut and my guy asked me what I had been up to lately. I said “Well, this is Junior Historian week. So I’ve been outside with a bunch of teenagers.” His shocked response: “Whatever possessed you to do that?”
Confession time: this is one of my very favorite programs. But maybe I am a little crazy. For many, many years (no one is exactly sure how long, but we’re talking about decades), Dallas Heritage Village has had a Junior Historian program for teens. The basic format hasn’t changed too much: ..

Thursday, June 2 was an explosive day at Dallas Heritage Village. For the first time ever, the Curatorial department disposed of an antique from our collection by blowing it up, with the help of the Dallas Police Department’s bomb squad.
There was no act of terrorism or other criminal threat, just a dangerous chemical legacy from the past. The artifact was a brown glass bottle that once contained liquid picric acid. Doctors and dentists used this around 1900 for medical purposes, particularly to treat burns. Liquid picric acid is poisonous, but that would not be enough to scare a history curator. Collections of historic artifacts can contain many dangerous things, including medical artifacts. Many early medicines were substances that, technically speaking, were poisons, ..

Nip: Can you believe we’ve been here since 2000? Getting from Georgia to Dallas was quite the adventure, and one I don’t care to repeat. And after growing up on a farm, this was a very strange place to be.
Tuck: There were kids everywhere! And they made us pull those kids around on a wagon. I really don’t like pulling that wagon.
Nip: But it didn’t take us long to realize this was the place for us, because we were The Stars. Kids lined up for rides. They scratched our noses. They even tried to hee-haw. Try is key here—no one does this near as well as we do.
Tuck: Even as The Stars, we’ve had to put up with all sorts of things. One December, we were loaded on to a trailer to visit another muse ..

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Dallas Heritage Village is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and is an institutional member of the Texas Association
of Museums. The Dallas County Heritage Society maintains Dallas Heritage Village which is supported, in part, by the
City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.